Google has always been moving toward cloud computing. They firmly believe it is the future of the web. They may be right, but there will always be a need for offline access, even with Gears.That could realistically be accomplished as more programs adopt Gears (a likely (planned) side-effect of the OS), or with platforms like Adobe Air that are extremely lightweight. The fact that they are investing in partnered rollouts of the OS onto hardware says to me they are attempting to saturate the market a bit with the concept and so embed it into the minds of both developers and the general public, thereby furthering their goal of a cloud computing world — and, of course, inevitable world domination. On a sort-of side-note, I am sure I had heard, a while back, that Microsoft was working on a cloud OS as well…